by Rebecca Ore
A Deep Ecologist shouldn’t do this, I thought as I took a tiny sip of large molecules. The taste was vaguely metallic. Within seconds, my nose began to feel warm. I swallowed some of the nanobugs, then took another sip from the beaker. Kearney massaged my shoulders.
Would I liquify? Kearney would tell Amnesty that I’d had a nano accident. I couldn’t open my jaws for the next sip. The tech pulled down my lower lip and poured the last of the nanobugs through my clenched teeth.
The fluid seeped into me. I was being converted to another person. “How long will it take?” I asked.
Kearney answered, “Two months. We’re changing pigmentation, basically, eye color, hair color. Cartilage. Most of how we recognize each other is facial proportions, eyes in relation to ears, to nose. We’ll change those.”
“Not all the organs.”
“No.”
“So I’ll still be forty-three inside.”
“Forty-four,” Kearney said. “No, the process won’t tamper with your memory.”
“You say.”
“Allison, haven’t I been honest with you all through this?”
“My nose feels warm. And my ears.”
“Three-quarters of the bugs go straight for the cartilage,” the tech said. Kearny nodded at him and he left.
“Would you want Jim to visit? We can’t put you with other people being re-faced because we don’t want any of you to be able to identify each other. For the same reason, we can’t put you in general prison population. We could put you in a cyberia for duration, but those interactions are never quite natural enough. You need to stay oriented.”
“What about my semi-sweet control?”
“Wouldn’t you prefer to wait until you look young again?”
“No,” I said. “He*s got to see me change.”
Kearney smiled. I wondered if he’d manipulated me into requesting this. We held our thoughts a beat, then Kearney said. “So he knows who you really are?”
“No, because if he and I don’t work, you’ll have time to find me a new semi-sweet control.”
“Half-sweet.” Kearney said, We left my loneliness unconfessed; Jim couldn’t be with me every day. He had other prisoners to save.
It all happened so fast. It all happened so slow. The day after I took the nanobugs, Kearney brought me my control, my computer-picked demon lover.
The man came in behind Kearney, not quite as sure of himself as a stud dog when the pen door opens and a bitch falls in. He looked like a young Jergen, but not so obviously that I was insulted. Must be military with a body so stiff, I thought.
Perhaps he wasn’t supposed to be my lover, just my control. No, bed. Bed before the body became so much younger.
“Allison, Michael. Lieutenant Mike.”
“If you kiss me, I turn into a young princess,” I said.
The man seemed to access his files on dealing with women, his face flickering as different options presented themselves. Then the smile of lust and reluctance. Cocksure? Not quite? The lust was more and less than purely sexual. “Do you want that to be part of my job description?” Lieutenant Mike asked.
“I’m a prisoner. I doubt I can write anything into your job description.”
Kearney said, “You agreed to work for us. You asked me to bring him to you.”
Before I could answer, Lt. Mike said, “She agreed under duress.”
“Wow, you’re good,” I said.
Kearney said, “The job description for controls is that they can sleep with their agents if the control and his supervisor believe it would enhance the working effectiveness of the agent.”
I felt naked and ugly. “Can you move me out of this padded cell?”
“Yes,” Lt. Mike said although I’d looked at Kearney when I asked.
“Lieutenant Mike, you gonna brain-whip me like he does?”
“No, I’m going to get you moved. We’re going to talk about cover identities and about what you were like as a little girl.”
“I was an orphan, abandoned in Ohio. That about covers it and I don’t want to remember.”
“You remember all the time,” Lt. Mike said. Kearney moved as if to leave and suddenly I didn’t want to be left alone with this young stud control.
“I’ve got to make the arrangements for the room transfer,” Kearney said.
Lt. Mike stayed near the door. We didn’t speak to each other until Kearney came back. Since I had nothing to pack, we walked out through white corridors to a different wing of the building. I hated the strong dress, my bare feet, stubbly head and all the people who affected not to look at me.
Kearney unlocked a door. Inside was an apartment, not a cube, but a real multi-room apartment.
“We’ll give you something like this when you’ve caught the gene hacker,” Lt. Mike said. “It’s got two bedrooms, a study, kitchen, bathroom, communications room.”
We walked around. The walls had a oak chair rail running around all the them about three feet from the floor, and oak planks running around the ceiling, both chair rail and planks finished to show the grain, rounded comers, but no fussy routing of lines in them. The kitchen cupboards held all the cooking equipment I’d only read about. Real down comforters covered the beds. I’d always wanted something like this. All the stealing, the eco-terrorism stemmed from this apartment I never could get. Now I could get this if I caught our common enemy, a renegade gene hacker.
I felt cheap. Meanly grateful. I touched a fern hanging from the ceiling by a window. “Which bedroom is mine? Should I look in the closet?”
“The one on your right,” Kearney said.
“We’ll leave you alone to change,” Lt. Mike said.
Under my skin, in my skin, nanobugs repaired my collagen. Would I have to be alone to change? Was the soft down comforter a necessary part of the change, too light to deform my transforming cartilage? I opened the closet carefully, as if my fingernails would curl back if I pushed too hard.
Dresses bought to my measure hung on wooden hangers, hangers that matched the oak room trim. I pulled out one, a wool crepe. Who was it among the eco-terrorists had taught me textiles in her long run from her rich past? First underwear, I told myself, going to the chest of drawers built into the wall. I noticed then that none of the furniture in my bedroom, except for one small chair, could be moved.
Bras, panties, micro-fiber panty hose. I dressed quickly, then brushed my hair. I looked at myself in the mirror. Was it that obvious that I could be bought for a middle-class apartment?
Remember, you can’t really close the door on them, I reminded myself. I opened the drapes at what should have been one window and saw mirrors. The mirrors cleared enough to show me the camera behind the glass, then began playing a pastoral scene not quite detailed enough to begin to pass for real.
The other window appeared to be real. Or maybe just better. I tapped it with my index finger. It was polycarbonate or something even more high tech, and unbreakable. Beyond the window, I saw three double fences, high wire topped with razor wire, and robot guns from shoebox size to the size of German Shepards patrolling the plowed ground between the fences.
A robin landed near one of the smaller guns. The turret swiveled, back and forth as though measuring the robin. It didn’t fire. The robin pulled a worm out of the plowed ground and flew away.
I wondered if the gun made a mistake or if it really could discriminate between a robin and a robot message pod. Maybe…
Maybe nothing. I looked for shoes and found a pair of low-heeled casual shoes. They didn’t match the dress, but then I’d been barefoot since I’d been captured.
I went back out to the men. Lt. Mike poured me a drink.
“I can drink alcohol, then?” I asked. The men nodded. Then we sat down in seductive chairs and watched the big screen TV play laser discs of old movies, resting from the conspiracies that opposed and bound us for a few hours, me changing alone.
In the bottom of my head, untouched by either the brain reading net or the nanobugs scavenging my o
xidized tissues, was an old argument, “Are we fish or are we something more than primates?”
Jergen said if Jewelfish could talk, they’d have reasons for their dominion over a tank. They’re smarter than most fish, take care of their young, have a complex signal system, and are certainly more intelligent than anything else with gills in their shallow weedy home waters.
If humans argue that because we can totally dominate the rest of the universe for our benefit, then we should, that argument, according to Jergen, makes us no better than Jewelfish.
I had another reason to hate people. Brazil began gunning down abandoned children in the late twentieth century and by the middle of my century, the practice spread to Ohio. I was a toxic waste to the system myself, a product of spewing ovarian products all over the landscape.
“A penny for your thoughts,” Lt. Mike said.
“I wish you’d come along when I was fifteen,” I said.
“No system is perfect,” Lt. Mike said. “We all just do our best. You could have told the police about your parents and maybe the court could have helped put your family back together again.”
“Same as Jewelfish,” I said.
“You’re a fish-head?” Lt. Mike said. “I thought Deep Ecology environmentalists were opposed to keeping fish in captivity.”
“We only use them as analogies,” I said.
“I think we make a big mistake when we demonize each other,” Lt. Mike said. “We’re both people. We mean to be reasonable and do right.”
“I was excluded from your warm, fuzzy world.”
“Deep Ecology’ was never your true movement. They used you. And it wasn’t us, it was your parents who abandoned you.”
“Martin Fox used me.” I said.
“If you hate people, don’t you end up using them as tools? Sending them out to die?” Lt. Mike said.
“I don’t hate people.” I said. “I don’t give a damn anymore.” I went to the mirror in the living room and stared at my face. I was beginning to look younger, stripped of freeze-dried ideals. I wanted someone to hold me, cuddle me. As had always been the case in my life, I’d have to trade sex for a cuddle. “Hold me?” I wanted to say, but it came out as a question.
Mike came up and held me. I shuddered and he kept holding me, patting me gently on my back. When I cried, he kept holding me, patting my back, just holding me.
“Why didn’t my parents do that to me?”
“They didn’t know who you were,” Mike said. “They were too wrapped up in their own troubles, I’m sure. Since you weren’t registered at birth, they must have been living irregularly.”
I expected his hands to move to my breasts when we sat down on the couch, but they didn’t. This holding seemed both incredibly comforting and ridiculous at the same time. I couldn’t as a forty-four-year-old woman be a sexless child getting reassured as to my basic human value. Yet, I was a child right now and fucking me would be rape.
I cried myself to sleep and woke up on the couch wrapped in a quilt, still dressed.
Mike came over with a cup of coffee. “You’re unspeakably good,” I said, “even the false flaw of offering me coffee when I don’t drink coffee.”
He looked at the cup and said, “I honestly forgot. I’d actually fixed this for me, but since you were awake…”
“Fix me some tea,” I said, moving off ready to shower away those silly tears. Then I stopped and said, “Thank you.”
Mike sipped on the coffee himself. He nodded. I went on for my shower, wondering if I could bum the nanomachines in my skin or if heat quickened the process.
In back of a nasty car sometime after the third decade of the Third Millenium, my mother had whacked my nose crooked, so slightly it was only visible when I looked. The nanotech machines had begun to rebuild my nose. I could see the change already.
I dried off with the blower and patted off the remaining water, wiped the mist from the mirror and looked at my nose again. It was straight, longer. Was I imagining that the nano-machines had wound my cheek bones closer together?
When I was dressed, I used eyeliner to make the nose look as it had before, then cleaned off the false shadows.
They’d given me eyeliner, I realized only after I’d used it to make my nose look crooked again. Did drode heads use eyeliner? I’d avoided looking too closely at them.
When I came out, I asked, “Do female drode heads use makeup?”
“When they can get it,” Mike said. “They’re human beings, after all. They can’t afford reworking so they do what they can to look good.”
Suddenly, I wondered how old Mike really was? “Are you going to wait until I’m good-looking before you fuck me?”
“If you really want sex with me, I’ll sleep with you.”
“Ooh, that’s right cold.”
“Don’t be embarrassed about last night.”
I couldn’t answer him. He handed me a cup of tea with just the right amount of sugar. I didn’t trust myself to say anything further right then, so drank my tea. He microwaved frozen omelettes and made a sauce for them with fresh tomatillos and coriander right in the blender. Perhaps he was more than a lieutenant. He could be as old as my father, but rebuilt.
I managed to say, “Thank you.”
Probably not as old as my father. After breakfast, I swept the tomatillo husks off the counter and put them in the composting bin.
Soon, I became a bit bored. Mike taught me how to play tennis in a quonset hut. I ran on an indoor track. Industrial exercise, Jergen used to call anything done indoors or with machines.
Mike was unnaturally patient for someone naturally young.
“Most of our work was in the west,” I said to Mike. “We were fighting lawless people.”
“Who told you they were lawless?”
“I found cyanide guns set out.”
“You know ranchers put them there?”
I remembered the man standing in the back of his pickup, a dead deer at his feet, a syringe in his hand, injecting poison, Jergen shot him as he dropped the syringe and reached for a rifle. “The newspapers told about a prominent rancher murdered in the back of his pickup. He was setting out a ten-eighty bait. I thought no one could legally make ten-eighty.”
“When did this happen?”
“Back when. He was pulling a rifle on us.”
“How did you know it was ten-eighty?”
“We fed some to a rat. The rat died. We waited three days, then fed the rat to a cat. The cat died. The cat poisoned…”
“So, you aren’t adverse to animal experimentation when it suits your purposes.”
“I guess we should have caught another rancher and fed it to him,” I said.
Steve said, “We’re not asking you to go against your principles. The man making these insects is as much a danger to your cause as ours.”
“A real ecological saboteur,” I said. I imagined the guy in his lab, smiling a twisted smile under his rebuilt eyes, having been born the kind of nerd who’d need glasses if it hadn’t been for his parents’ money. “Person has to be removed from real life for sending out giant tranquilizing mantises against the already passive drode heads.”
What happens, I wondered, after we get this mad scientist? Will the Feds really let me walk away? “Mike, why do you keep asking me what I really believe?”
“I want to understand you better.”
“To control me better.”
“Yes, but that’s not all of it.”
I fantasized bringing him to my side. I knew better, but the fantasy made me smile slightly.
By now, I was younger yet. I threw up every morning as though I was pregnant. My body thought it must be, growing an alternate self. The routine—working out in the gym, walking inside the fences with Mike.
One week, a punctuation. Two nurses, one a prison nurse from my time in the strong dress, came to the apartment jail with a lump of plastic and metal hollowed nose-shaped inside. “It’ll guide the nanomachines,” the prison nurse sai
d. “You’ll breathe through two tubes.”
The other nurse said, “We’ll glue it to you with electrosetting glue, no straps that might slip.”
An orderly wheeled in an ultrasound machine with a narrow probe. That goes up my nostrils, I realized. Funny to be so queasy about this nose work when the Feds had had my brain open, under a squid. “Does the ultrasound repel the nanomachines?” I asked.
The team didn’t answer, but moved the nose void over my own nose. One breathing tube up one nostril, the ultrasound probe up the other.
“A cunt-hair to the right,” the prison nurse said.
I felt both the tube and the probe press against the left side of my nostrils. I felt as though I was being smothered. Mike reached for my hand and held it until they’d gotten the nose form settled and set. Then they pulled out the probe and fitted both breathing tubes with rubber stops.
After the nurses and tech left, Mike gave me a backrub. I tried to remind myself that they were still playing Good Cop, Bad Cop.
“We’ll need to register your new appearance with Amnesty when we’re done. You met Jim, of course.”
“When I was older,” I said.
Later that week, a surgeon and two nurses came in and used old-fashioned laser surgery to raise my ears. The plastic bandage looked like my own skin. No, lighter than my own skin had been. So this was the pigment change.
In two weeks, the nurses peeled the nose form off my face. I now had a high narrow nose. Two days after that, Mike brought me a coat after I dressed in the morning. “We’re going out,” he said. He pulled out a cloth hat, a high-fashion variant of a turban, that would cover my short hair.
“Out?”
“To a little town nearby. I thought you might like to get out around other people.” They’d turned me into a high WASP pixie.
“You trust me enough?” I pulled the hat on down to my relocated ears.
“We’ve got your head wired, remember?”
I nodded, then asked, “Is it a real little town?”
“It’s a training site, but we provide free housing to the extras and they’ve got real jobs outside the agencies, so it’s also a real enough town. But don’t tell anyone I told you.”
